The Madness (3 A.T.)
This article is about The Madness in 3 A.T. (2016 C.E.) For other Madnessen, see The Madness The Madness is an annual event where the mods go mad and the forum becomes weird for a few days due to the application of wordfilters. Filters are usually used by bulletin boards to censor offensive words. During a Mod Madness, moderators use this system to change words into other words or symbols for their amusement. For about a day after the forum migration, individual users could turn off the wordfilters in their User Control Panel (Board Preferences; Edit display options; Enable word censoring; No). Previous Madnessen had no such escape and were viewed as an unavoidable Act of Mod. As of now the option to turn filters off has not been reinstated. In 2016, Madness was announced 9 March. (Cuegandix 15 Advent, 2 A.T.) The filtering of words started on the 18th of March. (Daveandix 24 Advent, 2 A.T.) The wordfilters stopped after the entire forum's migration to new hardware on 23 March. The filter discovery spreadsheet run by other forumites is here. Pre-Existing Filters These filters existed prior to the announcement of the Madness: '' New Filters in 3 A.T. ''Filters that were in effect for this year's Madness: ''Numbers Individual digits and the names of numbers were filtered into different numbers this year. As a result the OTT would appear as the "six True Thread" under the influence of filters. This also affected mentions of FaiD, which originally filtered to "The One True Forum" and as a result turned into "The six True Forum". This quick-reference table is sorted by increasing numerical order. Number words may be found individually in the main list above. This table does not include years. Months Quick reference for the month-swapping filters; may be found individually in the main filter list. Forum Descriptions On the xkcd board index , the various subforums and categories have listed descriptions that can also be affected by wordfilters, so mods create custom filters specifically to fit the descriptions. The new description for the first entry references the appearance of the OTT in that more typically "mayfly" forum. Subforum Descriptions Most of the subfora also had altered descriptions during the Madness. Post-Madness Filters For several days following the migration, there were no wordfilters at all remaining on the xkcd forum system. However, by 2016-03-30 the static filters that tend to remain year-round had been reinstated. 'These filters remained in effect after the Madness: ''' Other Madness Effects ''Forum Migration and the Loss of Immunity On 2016-03-23 the whole of the xkcd message board was migrated to new hardware by davean, the site administrator. In the process phpBB was updated to the latest version. This shift caused several small changes in site design, most notably a maximum viewing width. This migration also meant that the OTT lost its resistance to wordfilters in original posts, which was evident immediately as the migration happened in the middle of a Madness. The immunity had been granted in the very early days of Time, when filters were breaking the frames of Time being posted to the thread (the image urls had the word "time" in them). The OTT alone had been immune to filters for nearly three years. Wild Card Filters'' Use of the wild card character (*) in a filter will change every word in the forum to that filter. Generally these only last a minute or two and are soon removed since they make the fora impossible to understand. Of note for OTTers are the time this happened during the original OTC with a HODOR filter (see The Madness, 0 A.T. ), and the many occasions throughout last year's Madness where the wild card filters were used to simulate messages travelling via clacks in honor of Terry Pratchett (see The Madness, 2 A.T. ). In 2016 the wild card filters began with a nod to Terry Pratchett once more on the anniversary of his death.